ATI Catalyst 8.4 and Media Portal/TV ...

ATI/AMD released an update of their Catalyst drivers for all operating systems, so time to try it out, and see whether the 8.4 driver resolve the issue I had with Crossfire. The installation of 8.4 went flawless, and Crossfire has been activated. Now it is time to continue with the installation of Media Portal. After downloading the core Media Portal software from the Media Portal website, we can start the installation. During the installation I kept all the defaults, except that after the installation has finished the system asks to start the configuration, which I am skipping for the moment, as I am first going to install the TV Server software.

Installation of TV Server is a little bit more complicated, as MS SQL Server Express Edition has to be installed first. I started by downloading the latest snaphost, which is dated 8 April 2008 at the time of writing. Installation of SQL Server is pretty straight forward (accept all the default settings), although there is one important step that you should be aware of:

You have to select Mixed Mode (Gemengde Modus in Dutch) in the dialog box above, and supply a password (please make sure you remember this one ).

After installation of SQL Server I fired the TV Server installation file, and it started with the following error message:

It just tells me to install MS Visual C++ Redistributable Package Service Pack 1, which you can download from the Microsoft site. After installing this, the TV Server installation runs smoothly. Again I skipped the automatic start of the TV Server configuration. First I have to move the @Home Digital TV Config file into the proper TV Server Directory: C:\Program Files\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal TV Server\TuningParameters.

Now I can start TV Server Configuration by clicking on the appropriate icon on the desktop. In the first dialog box, you have to enter the password that you supplied during the MS SQL Server setup:

After supplying the password and pressing the Test button, the following message box pops up:

Click YES on this box, to make sure that the SQL Server Service is running in Automatic mode, and will be started automatically when you reboot your machine. Clicking the test button again will show all green fields in the Setup database connection dialog, and a Connection succeeded! message. By clicking the Save button, the connection information is saved, and the configuration can continue. By default the TV Service is not running, so it has to be started before we can continue with the configuration:

Clicking Yes will launch the TV Server Service and the MediaPortal TV Server management console will appear:

Expanding the TV Servers Section will bring up the following configuration screen:

At the Country drop down box select the NL-AtHome configuration file that we copied to the TV Server Tuning Parameters directory (as shown above).

By pressing the "Scan Predefined Provider" button the system will scan for all available channels on the cable. This will take a considerable amount of time, so get yourself a cup of coffee....

As you can see the scan found 99 Radio channels and 132 TV Channels. To enable Electronic Program Guide functionality the TV Channels tag has to be expanded and in the TV Epg grabber section all Channels should be selected in the Greb EPG for channels box.

Of course the same applies for the Radio channels:

Next thing to change is the Recording Folders in the Recording Settings. As I don't want the recorded channels and the timeshifting files to end up in the system partition, I change the folders to a folder I created on the Data drive:

That should be all for the time being on the TV Server.

Before testing Media Portal I decided to install the latest SVN snapshot available on the Team Mediaportal website, which is from 8 April 2008, version 05-05-Rev18584. To allow for a quick check whether the crashing problems with Crossfire I reported in an earlier post have been resolved, I only entered the TV Server host as being htpc in the Media Portal configuration. Firing up Media Portal and switching on the TV resulted in a crash again.

Because of the crash, I decided to go back to the Club3D card, which means uninstalling and installing ATI Catalyst Drivers once more.